Boys Will Be Boys review: Clementine Ford on how boys should really behave

By Katherine Brabon

18 October 2018 — 3:29pm

SOCIETYBoys Will Be Boys Clementine Ford Allen & Unwin, $32.99

At a launch of her second book, Boys Will Be Boys, writer and feminist Clementine Ford was asked, "Do you worry that your boy will grow up to be a dickhead?" Yes, she said, I do. Ford, author of the bestselling Fight Like A Girl, is now the mother of a young boy and her new book takes a piercing gaze at contemporary patriarchy, gendered oppression and toxic masculinity. Ford makes a cogent and passionate argument, as she said at the launch, that the system in which we live is "broken in teaching boys and men their place in the world".

Clementine Ford and her son.

When the sleepwear company Peter Alexander came under criticism for selling a jumper with "Boys Will Be Boys" on the front, radio 3AW host Tom Elliot criticised the backlash: "To me, when I think 'boys will be boys', it's the way that young boys tend to smash things and break things … they tend to be, on average, naturally more rambunctious than little girls…I don't think it's all about male violence towards women." Ford challenges the idea that there are things – colours, sports, behaviours – only for men and only for women. She is concerned as a parent, feminist and member of society, by the implications of a phrase such as "boys will be boys".

Ford begins with how we code gender in children even before they are born; how such practices create an idea of what boys and girls should like and be like. She then looks at the movies and TV shows we grow up watching. Drilling down into the statistics of representation, Ford shows how women and girls feature in shockingly few leading roles as actors, writers or directors in film and on TV; an "imbalance of power represented as normal". She then moves to the home and workplace, to domestic labour and the expected working roles of parents, both of which expose how traditional divisions are still deeply entrenched. Even in harmonious heterosexual relationships between men and women, "the gap between where we live in the world is treacherous and deep".

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Boys Will Be Boys by Clementine Ford.

A chapter on men's rights activists (many such activists are behind the online abuse Ford receives) shows how "they have been successfully conditioned by the patriarchal lie that says 'real men' are defined by their ability to dominate others and, in turn, command their respect".

Ford then draws important links between our conditioning of gender in young children and the consequences both for men and women as they grow older. This is an important discussion because experts are telling us the same. Domestic Violence Victoria chief executive Fiona McCormack says "[w]e know there's a link between poor attitudes towards women and also … an acceptance towards violence as part of masculinity". Ford argues that we have to change erroneous insistence "that girls and boys experience sexuality differently, and that one group must protect themselves". Ford's chapter on rape culture, whereby rape is "minimised and normalised through dismissive attitudes", compellingly articulates this link.

In conversations about patriarchy and violence towards women, we often encounter the response: "but not all men." Ford is sick of it. She's also concerned that it shows a lack of curiosity about women's lives. Such apathy can reach frightening extremes.

The public expose of alleged sexual assault by Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh dominated the press. for a while. What's worrying about this discussion is not just the widespread doubt over the truth of the claims, but that "even if" the accusations are true, some think they are just not relevant. Former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer asked publicly whether high-school misdemeanours of the kind Kavanaugh is accused should be brought up at all: "Should that deny us chances later in life?" he asked. "Even for Supreme Court job, a presidency of the United States, or you name it?" Boys will be boys permits behaviour; it also condones ignorance.

Ford writes as a feminist and as the mother of a young boy. "We should demand more of boys. We should also demand more for them." Ford does not claim to have solutions. This book enables us to take a serious look at how we live. It asks us to demand and make a different kind of world for boys to grow up in; a world that doesn't tell them they need to be "the tough one", violent or in control, to be a person.